BioLabs

Aging project

Status: Active

Aging is accompanied by alterations happening in the whole organism and within the individual cells. This study aims to comprehensively characterise changes happening in the distinct human cell type and its environment during the process of healthy aging. We have compared classical CD14+CD16- monocytes obtained from blood of two sex- and race-matched cohorts: 20 young individuals (24-30 years old) and 20 older people (57-70 years old) without any acute or chronic inflammatory conditions, no history of smoking, and with comparable body-mass indices. We comprehensively characterised the plasma and classical monocytes from both cohorts using proteomic and metabolomic profiling, RNA-Seq, RRBS (DNA methylation) and ULI-ChIP-seq for 5 major chromatin modifications (H3K27ac, H3K27me3, H3K36me3, H3K4me1, H3K4me3).

The comparative epigenetic study of this scale has never been undertaken previously in the context of human aging. Since the peak calling routine presents significant challenge in working with large scale human epigenetic data, we developed a novel semi-supervised peak calling approach applicable to datasets of this scale.